A Python Being Surprising

And some cool graffiti.

Good Evening:

Seen at a Metro station in Washington DC. It’s unclear to me whether it refers to the president or to your unpleasant husband. Either way, I find it encouraging.

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Yesterday on #DogShirtTV, the Ugandan military chief wants Turkey’s most beautiful woman. Also, Victor Orban’s out. It was an unusually good show:

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Yesterday On Lawfare

Compiled by the estimable Marissa Wang

The Principle-Policy Gap in American Tax Attitudes

Ajay K. Mehrotra reviews Andrea Campbell’s new book, “Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes,” on the American public’s opinion on taxes and its impact on U.S. tax policies. Mehrotra unpacks how Campbell addresses provocative questions on taxation, her predictions on the future of tax policy, and the implications of her findings.

One of the great puzzles of the recent tax-cutting frenzy is why have so many everyday Americans agreed to this new policy prescription? Why aren’t the majority of taxpayers in favor of higher taxes on the rich? Why do they support limiting estate taxes, which affect only the wealthiest Americans, or cutting the corporate tax? Self-interest, after all, would suggest that the non-rich majority would favor higher taxes on the minority of uber-wealthy individuals and companies that have prospered in our New Gilded Age from growing inequality and greater concentrations of wealth.

In her fascinating new book, “Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes,” MIT political scientist Andrea Louise Campbell takes on that set of questions. More broadly, Campbell addresses the fundamental query: “Why is it so hard to raise taxes in the United States? Why is it so difficult to fund government?” As one of the country’s leading experts on public opinion and American politics, she naturally turns for answers to public attitudes toward taxes.

America Used to Own the Internet. Now It’s Running Scared.

Nikolas Guggenberger argues that the United States’ increasingly restrictive attitude toward data exports is a sign of geostrategic weakness. Guggenberger explains how this defensive approach implies a lack of confidence in U.S. technological dominance, reveals a self-perception of vulnerability, and suggests a lack of control over platforms and tech infrastructure.

For most of the internet era, the United States has preached the gospel that free data should flow across open borders for information with no barriers to digital trade. When the European Union limited the flow of personal data across the Atlantic, U.S. officials cried foul. What the EU presented as fundamental rights grounded in human dignity, U.S. officials dismissed as thinly veiled protectionism, compensating for European weakness. The U.S. position was clear: Free data flows are good, and anyone who disagrees is either afraid or falling behind.

Then TikTok emerged—and the U.S. blinked.

Pulling Reports, Playing Politics

In the latest edition of Lawfare’s Foreign Policy Essay series, Joseph Stabile examines the CIA’s intelligence assessment of the role of women in white supremacist violence, one of the many reports agency leadership has retracted for not meeting the CIA’s analytical standards. Stabile argues that the assessment’s withdrawal has less to do with a failed quality assurance test and more to do with a seemingly ongoing effort on the part of the intelligence community to appease the Trump administration’s political agenda.

Among these assessments, the retraction of one product in particular, “Women Advancing White Racially and Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremist [REMVE] Radicalization and Recruitment,” carries several concerning implications. The withdrawal of the report belies observable evidence about transnational extremist threats, contributes to the politicization of the intelligence community, and raises alarm in light of the administration’s ongoing spread of white supremacist rhetoric.

Podcasts

On Lawfare Daily, I sit down with Eric Columbus, Molly Roberts, and Roger Parloff to discuss the D.C. Circuit’s denial of Anthropic’s motion to stay its supply chain designation, Judge Paul Friedman‘s rejection of the Pentagon’s revised press rules, Judge Leo Sorokin’s rejection of the Department of Justice’s attempt to obtain Massachusetts voter records, and more.

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Today’s #BeastOfTheDay is the python, seen here being surprising:

Video Source

In honor of today’s Beast, eat a Lufthansa airplane.